First of all, we completed what felt like a mountain of paperwork to prepare for our homestudy. The social worker reads this and asks questions based on what is in your file. In order for our homestudy to be valid in North Carolina, we had to have at least three visits with our social worker that were at least one week apart, and one of those visits had to be in our home. The purpose of these is to establish that the home is a safe environment -- physically, emotionally, and physically -- for a child and to gather more information for the report.
I have to say that I feel very blessed. I imagined that it would be a terrifying experience, but our social worker was just amazing. She made us feel comfortable to share and encouraged us with Scripture often during our meetings. This is one of the wonderful things about our agency! I felt from the start that I was free to share my feelings about God leading us toward adoption and how our faith impacts our lives.
Each meeting was different.
Meeting 1 - we met at the agency and discussed our marriage and a little bit of general information about ourselves
Meeting 2 - we met in our home and our social worker looked around to make sure that we had smoke detectors and fire extinguishers; we also talked about our intended parenting style and how we plan to discipline
Meeting 3 - we met individually with our social worker and talked about our upbringing, our extended family, and how we each felt about our marriage
Some of the questions sounded like this: "Why do you want to adopt?" "How do you handle conflict in your marriage?" "How would you want your child to describe you?" "Is your family supportive of your adoption?" "Describe your husband." "Tell me about your journey with infertility."
How does a homestudy feel for the adoptive parents? Although I feel that we had a great experience, it still felt a bit awkward. It is difficult to not have the (however fleeting) thought that it is not fair for every part of my life to be examined so thoroughly. Even though we had a wonderful social worker, I am still an introvert and sharing my deepest thoughts about some difficult issues on command with a stranger is very difficult.
What is funny is that I was so stressed about the visit to our home, and it wound up being completely fine. My friends and I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned the weekend before, and the social worker was so relaxed about it and just looked around for about 5 minutes and then moved on to talking with us about the topic for that visit.
BUT the whole experience was so valuable and worth it. I always felt encouraged by the things that Chris and I got to share about one another. It reaffirmed to me how great of a father he is going to be! And, we are one huge step closer to bringing our little one home. At the end of it all, there is nothing I wouldn't do for our child, and that includes the homestudy.
What is our next step? We wait. We wait for the social worker to send us the completed homestudy document. We will sign that document and have it filed with the state. We then pay to be placed on the waiting list at our agency. And then we wait again for THE phone call! We don't have any idea how long that could take, but we appreciate your prayers as we do a whole lot of waiting in the next few months.
Thanks for sticking with me through this quite long narrative. I hope that if you are going through the adoption process, it has encouraged you that it is not as scary as it may seem.
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." {James 1:17}
