Applying Myself

I wasn’t a straight A student in school.  I probably could have been, if like my younger sister, I had “applied myself” more in school.  Application was never my strong suit.  I certainly did well, but I fell short of perfect in many ways.  Once again, in the recent past, I had a problem with application.  Only this time it was the dreaded adoption agency application.  When I look back on it I realize that it was only four pages long.  How could four pages cause me such anguish?

Page one, demographics.  Should be easy enough.  Name, birthdate, city of birth, height, weight.  Wait a second.  Weight?  Why do they need to know that?  Are only skinny people able to be good parents?  If I enter it honestly, will that be held against me?  Is this going to be something potential birth mothers look at and judge me for?  Am I less likely to be a good parents because I enjoy a big slice of pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner?  Okay, grit my teeth and write down the dreaded number that is normally privy only to me, my doctor, and the perpetually smiling woman at the counter at Weight Watchers.  That hurdle behind me, I move on.  Social security number, address, employer, job title, salary.  That one gives me pause, too.  Who is going to be looking at this information?  Will they think that we are financially secure enough to be given a child?  This is not something people must disclose before they are allowed to give birth to a child.  It feels somehow unfair that my most intimate details have to be shared in this process. 

Now they want information on children we already have.  I fill in the names and ages of my two teenage stepsons.  I love my stepsons, but it’s not the same as having a child of my own.  Again the nagging wondering if their existence will be held against us in some way.  Will the people who make the decisions look at these two lines on the application and think that we are not truly deserving of the gift they have the power to give us?

Page two, emergency contacts.  We each have to provide the name, address, and phone number of three people who can reach us immediately, any time of the day or night.  In this day of Blackberrys and Droids, it seems superfluous.  Where am I going that I cannot be reached?  If I decide to take a trekking vacation in the Himalayas and am far from a cell phone tower, will that be the moment that the agency needs to contact me to find out the name of my first grade teacher or how much income tax I paid in 1997?  And if I am closer to home but still unavailable, is it likely that my brother or my husband’s parents will know where I am?

Page three, the most dreaded of all.  References.  Who in my life do I trust to speak on our behalf as to what type of parents we will be?  And to make things even more complicated, these are supposed to be five people who have seen us interacting with children.  When you don’t have children, how many people really see you interacting with them?  I can put down my high school friend who lets me do crafts with her kids every few months or the woman at church whom I assisted with at vacation bible school last summer.  How do I know what anyone will say about us, though?  Who do I trust to name as my ambassadors in what I suspect is the most important part of the whole endeavor of filling out this application?  Our pastor, that’s easy.  He said he’d do it and even had a smile on his face.  A coworker who works in the social services.  She’ll know the right things to say, right?  My friend who had her own infertility issues and knows my struggles.  Certainly she will be compassionate and choose the right words to convey how much this means to us.  Of several friends from church, I choose the one with whom I spend the most time, who also knows my husband.  And best of all, she’s a teacher.  I somehow feel that this is an almost holy endeavor, teaching elementary school children.  Surely that will make us sound like good parent material; a teacher knows us and still thinks we should be given the responsibility of raising a child. 

And then there’s the fifth line on the application.  I look at the list and see that everyone on it knows me better than they know my husband.  Clearly, the fifth reference should be someone who has known him for a long time.  Someone who can vouch for his character and his relationship with his teenage boys, both of whom have grown taller than him in the past year.  Someone who can look at him and see what I see: a man who tries to be tough but is really gentle.  A man who makes too many corny jokes but only does it because he likes to see other people smile.  A man who tries to act like this doesn’t matter to him as much as I does to me, but I know the truth.  He wants to see me happy, but he also wants to do it again.  He wants the chance to raise another child into adulthood…..but mostly he wants a child who will look up to him instead of the other way around.

Page four, like sliding into home plate.  Sign our names, write out the check and send it off into the void.