Who we are · Our timeline · What nobody told us · Money · The new law · Our support group
The boys' own page · Questions to ask your caseworker

We said we'd each write half of this page, so we did. Where it says Mike at the bottom of a paragraph, that's Mike. Where it says Mary, that's Mary. Where we disagree, we left it in.

We live on forty acres north of Springfield, Missouri, with a few beef cows, a big garden that gets away from us every August, a farm dog named Biscuit, and since July of 1997, two boys. I teach agriculture at the high school and sponsor our FFA chapter, which means I spend a good part of every spring in a show barn. I'm forty-four. I was raised Methodist and still am, and I'm not much of a talker, so Mary will probably write the longer paragraphs.
-- Mike

He's right. I'm forty-three, and I've been a labor-and-delivery nurse for nineteen years. We tried for a baby of our own for six years. I'm not going to write about those years except to say that I spent them helping other women bring their babies into the world, and then driving home. When we finally stopped trying, in the fall of 1995, we were tired and sad, and we also had two empty bedrooms upstairs and a lot of love with nowhere to go.
-- Mary

Brandon is twelve now and James is ten. They're brothers. They came to us from foster care when they were ten and eight. This page is for anybody thinking about adopting an older child, from people who were sure they knew what they were getting into and didn't. We'd do it again tomorrow.
-- Mike

To be fair, some people did tell us. The class covered most of this. But there's knowing a thing and there's living with it at the supper table, so here it is the way we learned it.
-- Mary

1. They grieve, and they're loyal. Our boys lost their first mother, their first home, two foster homes, a school and most of their toys, all before Brandon was ten. Getting a new family doesn't cancel that out. For the first year James slept with a picture of his birth mother under his pillow, and Brandon wouldn't call us anything at all, not Mike and Mary, not Mom and Dad, nothing. He'd wait until you looked at him. We learned never, ever to say a bad word about their first family. They love her. They're allowed to.
-- Mary

2. The honeymoon ends. For three months they were the politest boys in Greene County. They said yes sir and made their beds. Then in October, about the time the leaves turned, Brandon threw a chair, James stopped sleeping through the night, and the both of them figured out every button we had. Our caseworker, Vicky, said, "That's good news. It means they think they might be staying." It didn't feel like good news. She was right anyway.
-- Mike

3. They will test whether you'll keep them. Not in words. In behavior. Brandon told me later, he was twelve by then, that he'd been "seeing what it took." Kids who've been moved from house to house expect to be moved again, and some part of them wants to get it over with. The only answer we found is to say it out loud, often, in plain words: you are staying here, you are ours, nothing you do is going to change that. Then prove it the next day, and the next.
-- Mary

4. School records come late. The boys started at their new school in August with nothing but a report card. Brandon's records from his last school showed up in November. They said he'd been tested for a reading problem the year before, which nobody had told us or his new teacher. Ask for the records before placement, and then ask again. Then call the old school yourself.
-- Mike

5. Find a therapist who knows adoption. Not just a good counselor, a counselor who knows adopted kids. Our first one meant well and told us to use a sticker chart. The second, Patricia Stancil, had worked with foster and adopted children for twenty years. She saw all four of us, sometimes together, and she taught us more than the whole class did. Ask your caseworker and your support group who the families go to.
-- Mary

6. Some of your friends won't understand. People said "they're lucky to have you." They're not lucky. They had a terrible run of luck, and we're what came after it. People also asked, in front of the boys, "Do you know anything about their real parents?" We say "their birth mother," and we keep our answers short, and we don't tell their story to anybody. It belongs to them.
-- Mike

7. You won't be perfect, and it'll still work. I have yelled. Mike has had to walk out to the barn and stand there awhile. Every family does that. What we didn't do was give up, and that's the whole job.
-- Mary

For the record, I was checking on the cows.
-- Mike

We are not lawyers or accountants. This is what we learned, and every state and every child is different, so ask your caseworker and a tax preparer about your own case.
-- Mike

Adoption assistance. Many children waiting in foster care count as having "special needs." That doesn't always mean a disability. In our case it was their ages and the fact that they came as a pair. Children who qualify can get a monthly adoption assistance payment and Medicaid, usually until they're eighteen. The agreement has to be worked out and signed before the adoption is final. We nearly missed that. Don't let anybody hurry you past it, and don't be embarrassed to ask. It's there so kids like ours can find families like ours.

The federal adoption tax credit. Starting with the 1997 tax year, there's a federal tax credit for adoption expenses, up to $5,000 per child, or up to $6,000 for a child with special needs. It covers what you actually paid out, like court costs, attorney fees and travel, and it phases out for families with higher incomes. Adopting out of foster care cost us very little, so ours was small. For families paying an agency, it's a big help.
-- Mary

The Adoption and Safe Families Act, signed in November 1997, says a child's safety comes first and pushes the states to settle on a permanent home for children in foster care sooner, so kids don't wait for years the way ours did.
-- Mike

Home to Stay is a group of adoptive and foster-adopt families that meets the second Thursday of every month at 7:00 in the meeting room of our county library branch. There are usually ten or twelve families. The kids go to the children's room down the hall with two sitters, and the grown-ups drink weak coffee and tell the truth. Nobody there says "they're lucky to have you." If you're in southwest Missouri and thinking about adopting, come sit in the back. You don't have to say a word.
-- Mary

One more page we'd point you to: Our Foster Kids, by two dads in Los Angeles, about getting licensed as foster parents and their first placement. Different part of the country, same paperwork.
-- Mike