Last Home Visit and Race Discussion

9/9/2010

Tuesday our Home Study SW came over to comlete our Home Study interviews and our home inspection. She was here for over 3 hours! It was a great interview. We talked a lot about issues surrounding race and adoption. We're open to any race, we thought it wouldn't really matter if our child was of a different race from us. We talked about the importance of instilling a sense of pride in our child for her race. This sounds simple enough, we tell her how beautiful we think she is, but actually there's so much more to it. We talked about role models and mentors, cultural things such as music, food, books, movies, festivals, and cultural traditions. We even talked about white privilege and what that means for us and for her. I guess when your emeshed in something, you become blind to it. We were talking to Dylan (18) about culture after our meeting and he said, "well, that's easy cuz we don't have a culture". Just because we're not always aware of it, doesn't mean we don't have it. Of course we have a culture, and so will our little girl. It's not fair to expect her to completly accept our culture and reject her own. We need to celebrate, explore and embrace her culture just as we do our own. I'm feeling like this is a pretty big responsibility, and honestly, I'm not exactly sure how we're going to do this. A few of the questions our SW asked had to do with how we would handle it if our daughter came to us saying that someone said something mean to her about her race. This is hard. We both said that even the question made us feel protective of her and as though we wanted to shelter her from anything like this, but the truth is, in our society there is more of a chance that this will happen than not. How do we teach her about such ugly things as racism, and ignorance and teach her to love herself and to be proud of who she is at the same time? More to research, think about and pray about.

Anyways, our SW said that now she'll write up our Home Study, then send it to us for approval, then it gets submitted to the State for approval. She said that we should be licensed (for foster to adopt) by next month some time. Once we get that, she'll send out HOme Study out to other agencies and to the counties. Then it's a matter of waiting until we're matched. We have a challenging journey ahead of us, but one we can't wait to begin!