The Mountain of Paperwork

You will have to excuse my brief absence from posting lately.  We have been a tad bit busy.  After sifting through the mountains of paperwork required of us from medical histories, physician exams, live scans, more live scans, even more live scans, DMV requests, out of state CPS checks, autobiographies and questionnaires about our preferences for babies, we finally found the other side.  Sheesh. You would think we were trying to adopt a baby or something.  Seriously though.  It was a lot of paperwork.  A lot of forms that looked nearly identical to each other requesting essentially the same thing.  After two weeks of this, I was seeing cross eyed and didn't think it would ever end.  One thing I learned: the government (read the FBI, DOJ) is incredibly slow and behind the times when it comes to how they obtain finger prints.  Yes, they have this new fangled thing called live scan - a computerized "database" where your fingerprints are stored.  Naturally, when you hear the words computerized and database together, you would assume this would mean, do it once and you are forever in the system.  It works for criminals.  But no, it is some sort of Ponzi scheme where you are forced to pay more and more money every time you need to get finger prints.  I had thought since I had been finger printed to work at nearly every job I have had since getting into Psychology I would be covered.  The answer is no.  I thought that since I had to get finger printed even more recently to get my professional license it would be in the system.  I was wrong.  Every time someone needs your finger prints, you go back to the same database to have them taken again.  Even when you are doing two forms...AT THE SAME TIME! Preposterous.  Someone should write a strongly worded letter to the developer of this "live scan" contraption. I would volunteer, but as you can see, I am busy trying to get a baby.  

Now, if you weren't already exhausted from reading off the list of forms we have filled out, there is MORE, so please take a seat.  We have been working on a nice Dear Birthmother Letter.  This letter is our marketing tool to gain access to the hearts and eyes of perspective birth mothers.  This isn't just a one page, double-spaced letter that ends with "hugs and kisses, Chad and Travis".  It is a pamphlet.  Printed on card stock, professionally, filled with pictures and information about us.  It is a big deal.  When we went to the weekend orientation, this is what they put the most emphasis on for the entire process.  It is with this letter that we most often find a match for a birthmother.  So its a lot of work.  Thankfully, I am a planner.  When we went to the orientation about three years ago, they had mentioned this letter/website business, so I went to work as soon as we got home.  I started a website and saved it on our trusty MacBook (shameless plug, since it was 3 years old then, and I am sitting here typing on the old broad now).  I just pulled off the information from that original draft and plugged it into a Word document and made a few edits.  Now, we have a nice editor over at the agency who spends A LOT of time looking at this thing.  So I send it to him and a week later, he shoots it back to me riddled with edits.  I was expecting some feedback, but let's be honest.  I am a bit of a casual writer.  I think I am decent at the job.  I assumed some light revisions with a nice "You are awesome and this is great" on the bottom of the letter.  Yeah.  I didn't get that.  I got a lot of edits.  A lot of feedback, which was good to get, but kind of a blow to my ego.  All for a baby, right?  So, I made some corrections, polished it again, thinking it was even better than the first and waited for the response of utter amazement.  We got our second draft back this week.  It wasn't the response I was looking for.  Close to being done, but still just not there.  There is typically about a week between each edit - I guess he is "busy" with our competition...I wonder what he says about them - and that is a lot of time to wait.  To be fair, I may be a writer, of sorts, but I don't rarely write about myself in a marketable and favorable way. I enjoy the self-depreciating humor that comes with the trials and tribulations of my life.  So, to write no more than 950 words about who we are, where we live, what we plan to do with the child and how we want to involve her in our lives has been very difficult.  I was sticking with pretty general information, because, well, I'm not completely sure about what sorts of things we will do with our child.  I know we want to love him/her. I know we want to share the world with him/her.  However, they want specific examples.  Details and images of things we want to do.  Thats hard.  

So, I am on day two and counting, waiting for what I hope to be one of the last drafts so we can begin using their "online design center" to create the colors and layout of our letter so we can get a proof, and then cut another check for printing costs to make up about 100 of the suckers.  

They say this process - the paperwork, letter writing and home study (to be discussed in the next blog) - will take about 3-4 months.  It has been 3 weeks since the Weekend Intensive and we are rounding what I hope to be third base.  The sooner it gets done, the sooner we hit the books and start sitting longingly staring at the telephone.  I am hoping to beat some sort of a record for the quickest to get to the waiting portion of the experience.  

Needless to say, this has been pretty exhausting.  There is a lot to do.  I guess if we can't go through the pains of carrying the child, this is the next best/worst thing to do when trying to have a baby.  What is interesting in all of this, as the reality of the whole situation sets in, is that somewhere, in America, there is a girl who is about ready to get pregnant. And that girl is going to pick us.  I don't know where she is, but it is hard not to imagine a faceless (for now) girl, who is in, or going to soon be in, a very scary place and she is going to look to us to help her.  I am so excited for her. I find myself wondering, every day, if today is the day she got pregnant (not in the creepy way, thinking about the act).  I wonder if it is today that she realizes she is pregnant and starts to think about her options.  I think that is what pushes me to go through all of this so quickly.  I want to get out there.  I want to have our name come up when she calls into the agency as one of the couples that, on paper, matches with her.  Every day we aren't "on the books" is another day that another prospective birth mother slips through our fingers, out of our control.  I know there are a lot of people thinking, and that will tell me, it will happen when it is supposed to happen.  That the right person is going to fall into our laps.  I believe that, most definitely, but I want to help the process along.  Why not? Right? 

So that's where we are at.  My fingers are healing from all the paper cuts as I have weeded through the paperwork.  The scanner is getting a well deserved rest from all the work it has done getting each piece of paperwork sent to the right people.  We are getting close.  The control is quickly leaving our hands and moving into others that may not have the same intensity for us, specifically.  That is scary.  But that is part of the process.  I suppose there are a lot of pregnant mothers and expectant fathers who feel the same way as the belly grows.  Just waiting for the day their baby will arrive.  Ours is just a little more....nontraditional.  

Travis