Seeing the Light

This activity and excitement was coming at an already-busy time of the year. That we asked for it did not reduce the stress. When Dr. Kirschner knocked on our door that Saturday at 7:30am it was December 23rd – or “Christmas Eve Eve” for the child in you.

He spent the entire morning at our home, God Bless. He set up in our living room, plopped down in the old low-riding comfy chair, placed his laptop on the coffee table and generated our home study in real-time. In him, we found someone interested and integrated in our adoption. Our beloved friend Libby was as well, as she came over bright and early that morning to interview with Dr. Kirschner. We needed only one in-person reference interview and she graciously accepted. Had, however, she not been able to make it (Libby was all of seven full-months pregnant!) either one of our dear friends Dawn or Dordie were waiting in the wings to save us.

As splendid as our revival kicked off, we admittedly needed some saves even along this new way. To be sure, it was not peaches and cream. If Frank Adoption couldn’t start without the medicals, Datz couldn’t finish without all the forms (none of which were in their control). We knew of the well water and the notarized letters coming into the transition; a week or so later we learned Child Support Statements and Child Abuse Clearances were also needed.

The requirement for Child Support Statements was peculiar, since we’ve only been married to each other. The abuse clearances were more frustrating because we already had them….and couldn’t send them to Datz. More exactly, we didn’t personally have them, Frank Adoption did. For whatever amazing reason, an agency is not permitted to send this specific information between agencies. I looked for the law, and never saw the law; nonetheless, it is the law (at least in Maryland), supposedly for “confidentiality” protections. Humphff – never mind that it was we who wanted it shared.

Eventually, with some letter writing and “encouragement” we had those final documents come in, and on January 11th we received the draft home study report. Thanks be to God! Now it just had to be reviewed and accepted between our two agencies.

If there was a drawback to having two agencies it was being the proverbial middle-man, trying to facilitate moving the home study from draft to various revisions to the final version. It reminded me of a Dilbert cartoon with Dilbert standing at a whiteboard with only the word The on it. The caption said something like “few things are harder than having a group of people write a sentence.” And then the others within the single-paneled strip said: that’s a loaded word if you ask me; it all depends on what you mean by “the”; and this ain’t Shakespeare, let’s use words we can all understand. Hah!

Really, AGCI (thank you Chance!) and Datz were very good, and not surprisingly we all made it through without major casualties. Then on January 23rd – just a month and two days from the call with Matt at Datz – four notarized copies of the home study were delivered to our home!

A quiet guardian of this process was Ms. Jeanne, of Datz. Very knowledgeable and ever the professional, she should get a silver star for putting up with me (thank God a Purple Heart wasn’t necessary). Prompted once for feedback, she described me as “a little over-anxious.” That’s fair, and certainly kind, since she actually must have thought I was a nut. On top of the adoption process being personal and emotional, there are many “hoops” for the adoptive parents. Advice is available, support surrounds you, but in the end Rose and I were the only ones responsible for making certain we were thorough and that things are moving along. And by the Grace of God, moss did not grow on our rolling stone.

What does a family do with a notarized home study? They send it off to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS for short. We took that very step that very same day, overnighting it for delivery on January 24th.

There are particular pieces of the adoption process that we either took for granted, or where ignorant of. It is fine and dandy that we desired to adopt a child from China…but the United States of America would have say in the matter. Months earlier we had started this process with USCIS by completing form I-600A, an Application for Advance Process of Orphan Petition. We in fact needed to classify our future child as an immediate relative and ask for him or her to be allowed to enter the United States. And while the form was sent to the local Baltimore office, the petition was actually filed with the American Consulate in Guangzhou, China. That kicked off the fingerprinting requirements, and now we were following up with the second half.

True to form, the goal of this process is another form – the receipt of an I-171H, endearingly referred to as a Favorable Determination Letter. If the “FDL” isn’t like gold to the adoptive parents, it is the golden key to the dossier, for it generally is the last item needed to complete paperwork.

And so we waited for a favorable disposition from the United States of America. Ours is a government of the people and by the people; we prayed – as it was further stated seven score and four years prior in Gettysburg, a mere forty-five minutes from our home – that it was also for the people.