One dream Two strategies

We discovered a difference in approaches to foster / adoption Wednesday that I don't think we realized existed before.

Our caseworker had contacted us to let us know that there were some children that were available and in their big book of brochures, but not on the PA website. She was going to be in the area so she offered to drop over Wednesday night at 5 PM.

We both raced home that night and barely were in the door before she showed up with an extremely thick binder. Unfortunately, there was no separation of brochures that were on the website and ones not on the website, so we dug in. Reading the descriptions back to back to back was a challenge. Not only does Susan read about 3-4X as fast as me, but some of these were copies of copies of copies, and the descriptions started to look like cookie cutter write ups. One sentence about what foods they like, one about activities they like, and perhaps a line or two on personality and a vague description of any health issues.

As we perused the binder, we noted some children that we might want to know some more about, and this is where things got confusing for me. Time was running down and our caseworker had to leave for another appointment. Susan spoke up and asked the caseworker to get us more information for 5+ kids or sibling groups that we had looked at. This took me totally by shock.

You see, from my point of view we were "just browsing", and we would talk about the kids alone later and come back to it, narrow it down, see if we are drawn to any one child or sibling group and then ask for more information. Unfortunately, my habit is to mull things over and evaluate and re-evaluate something until I've come to a conclusion. I think this serves me well in my profession, but not necessarily in my personal life.

Susan's perspective, if I can be allowed to attempt to describe it, is that any kids we are interested in we should get more information on, then do some more evaluation on our feelings etc. I've taken to referring to this as the shotgun approach, where I would describe my approach as a laser approach. Focus in on one child or sibling group and follow up. I don't think there is anything wrong with either approach, but it really gave both of us a shock to find out each other had different expectations of the process we were going to follow. For now, we are going to take the shotgun approach. We are hoping that this way there will be less of a let down when children we are interested in are not available. We've already had that happen once and I think we were both saddened when the listing for the child disappeared. It will also give us a chance to explore the process and work out any other details of the process.

We are also struggling over waiting for our image of an "ideal" addition to the family versus helping out every child we see. It's very a very emotional process because your heart goes out to so many kids you see in the foster care system and I feel guilty and selfish if I say no to any one of them.

All this and we haven't even gotten to the stage of meeting with any kids and hoping that the fit feels right from both sides.