I'm up writing now because I got tired of trying to sleep in an oven. Whew.
So we're adopting. The original plan called for us to move to Listowel, Ontario--about 35 minutes northwest of Waterloo. Why Listowel? Well, the house prices are about 40% cheaper than they are here in the city. I would commute with Eva until the kids came along, and then I would find a part-time job in town and be a househusband the rest of the time.
Except it turns out that adopting in Perth County is a six to ten year process. Here in Waterloo, we could have our children nine months from now, and will almost certainly have them in two years.
Thanks to an extremely generous gift from my father and stepmother, we were able to find a house here in town that meets all our needs. Living in Waterloo changes everything.
1) I can keep my job. In fact, I have to.
2) In turn, this means that adopting infants is out, as we can not afford to have one of us stay home.
(I have nothing against parents who choose to use daycare, but it is most emphatically not our choice, for two reasons: one, it would take almost 80% of my net salary, rendering my job next to useless; two, we'd prefer to raise our kids ourselves.)
3) Both of us work school hours, or something close to them, so that means we're looking at two kids at or very near school age.
Why two kids? That's more at Eva's insistence than my own, although I've come to accept and agree with her take on it. I'm an only child. Only childhood is what I know, what I am most comfortable with. Eva believes on some level that I missed out. In my more sober moments, when I'm not besieged by images of our kids beating the snot out of each other, I know she's right.
Narrowing it down further, we want to adopt siblings. This puts us in fairly rare company, apparantly. But consider: we're asking two kids to put aside their pasts and make our home their home. Imagine being shown around your new house, scared out of your mind: "here's your room...here's your new Mommy and Daddy's room...and see that boy there? That's your new brother." I figure the transition would be much easier with someone there who is familiar.
There are relatively few physical disabilities we're not willing to embrace. But we are simply unwilling and unable to cope with the rigors of raising kids who are mentally challenged.
The biggest attraction of parenthood, for me, is instilling a love of learning and then watching our children learn. Quite simply, a diminished capacity for learning would diminish our joy of parenting.
Look, I know I'm being an elitist snob. I'm sorry for it. I work with mentally challenged kids--we have a job skills training program--and I've learned that I am actually pretty good with them. But I couldn't do it full time. I regard you parents who do as something akin to saints.
So two siblings who are at or near school age and not mentally challenged. I suspect that last detail is the one that's going to trip us up a bit, as it seems that most of the kids moving through the system have problems in that area, be they Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or something more immediate.
We shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment