The following essay was submitted to The Fountain 2021 Essay Contest for the theme “My Covid Story”. Of 1,000 entries, it was included on the shortlist of essays in consideration for the winner.
Waiting and Waiting (and Waiting)
by Daphne Strasert
I should be a mom by now.
It wasn’t a guarantee, not even a promise, but when we asked our adoption agency in 2019 how long we could expect to wait before we had our first foster placement (with the goal of adoption), they said that almost all of their families had one within a year.
Great! A year is a long time, but still shorter than the two years that we had heard for private adoptions, and not even close to the four year wait of an international adoption. A year was barely more than the nine months of a pregnancy.
We completed our home study and were approved for foster placements in March of 2020, just as officials shut down the annual Houston Rodeo to prevent a Covid super-spreader event.
The pandemic had finally reached American shores and we watched with baited breath to see what would happen. We followed the local and national guidelines. We cancelled our weekly game night with friends, set up to work from home, bought facemasks, and prepared to isolate for the ‘next few weeks’ so things could get under control.
Obviously, it went on much longer than that.
Tragedy rolled across the United States, striking major cities like our home of Houston hardest. We were fortunate, able to isolate ourselves and still maintain a sense of normalcy. Weeks of quarantine turned to months, but we were still hopeful.
Certainly, this was actually the perfect time to bring a child into our life. My husband and I were both at home. My job was flexible enough that I could handle any zoom schooling needs, and it would give us a chance to better bond as a new family before introducing the grandparents, aunts, and uncles into the situation.
Unfortunately, the situation on the foster care side of the equation was a slow-motion disaster. No one was prepared for a pandemic crisis in the Texas Department of Protective and Family Services. They certainly weren’t prepared for school and court closures, for prolonged loss of contact with families, for cancelled visitations. At first, they implemented a wait and see approach. Once the pandemic ended, they could get back to business as usual, right? Except that the pandemic didn’t end, hasn’t ended, and nothing is business as usual.
The number of children entering foster care plummeted. This wasn’t the good thing it appeared to be on the surface. Abuse and neglect didn’t stop. No, the only change was that now children were trapped at home with their abusers with no one to report their suffering. We could only read articles on the subject in horror, knowing we had done all we could, but still couldn’t do enough. Our home was open for a child that needed us, but we would be continuing to wait.
Early in the adoption process, we had warned our families that we likely wouldn’t make certain traditions and events in 2020, depending on when we were accepted as a match. We wanted to spend the early days of placement alone as a family, so we wouldn’t overwhelm our new child. Yet, as the months passed, vacations were cancelled, weddings postponed, and celebrations moved to zoom. Still no child arrived.
We knew there would be a sense of loss, not celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas with our families. But we had thought that loss would be overshadowed by the joy of a new family member. Everything we thought we might miss on the behalf of a child, we missed regardless. There was no joy, just an empty home.
We weren’t the only ones who were stuck. Children already in the foster system found themselves frozen in the process. With courts initially shut down and then moving at a snail’s pace, kids in temporary situations found those situations becoming more and more permanent. They struggled to navigate a new situation (a pandemic) within a new situation (a foster home).
Biological parents trying desperately to get their lives back on track (through drug treatment, new housing, or finding a job), were stymied by Covid restrictions and an economy on life support. Judges gave them more time, then even more time. All the while, the children suffered in limbo, not knowing if they would go back to their parents, to a relative, or to a permanent adoptive home. Visitations were halted, then restarted, then halted again.
The calls from our agency became few and far between. There simply weren’t any children to tell us about. Normally we would have been in contact with our coordinator every week, but now we were lucky if she checked in once a month, sometimes with nothing more to offer than sympathy that we were still waiting.
“I’m sure it will pick up soon,” she said, first in September, then in October, then in November and December. We stopped believing her assurances. She doesn’t mean to mislead us. She doesn’t know what will happen anymore than we do. But it’s her job to reassure us. We have decided to measure our expectations. We do not have to be fools enough to accept false hope.
Waiting is a normal part of the adoption process. But none of this is normal. No one knows what they’re doing. Not us, not our agency, not the social workers or judges working the cases. This year has seen a sharp, hideous decline in progress for children in foster care and it will take years to unravel the back up of cases.
Lots of families in the adoption process are desperate. After years of trying for a biological child, fertility treatments, perhaps a failed private or international adoption, some couples approach foster care adoption as an absolute last resort. They’ve waited, sometimes, for years already. And now their last chance is at a standstill.
Eventually, our adoption agency became desperate too. They called a mandatory meeting of all waiting foster families and implored us to 1) accept larger family groups 2) accept teenagers and 3) accept emergency placements. Large sibling groups and older children are the most difficult children to find families for and at the moment are some of the few placements that are still moving forward through the courts. The meeting was an exercise in agony. We watched our agency struggle with families that desperately wanted children, children who desperately wanted families, and a situation that kept them apart.
All of this started a series of heart wrenching conversations. Should we accept emergency placements, something we are utterly unequipped to deal with? Should we move to a larger house, which we neither want nor can afford? Should we be trying for a biological child, something we had planned to do after adopting? The questions go around and around, never quite coming to a conclusion. The discussions almost always end in tears.
Meanwhile the foster care situation only grows more gridlocked. Some prospective families saw lockdown as the perfect time to complete the extensive adoption training now offered over zoom. Adoption agencies received an influx of applicants—so much so that our agency stopped accepting new families.
Adoption isn’t a competition (we all want these children to have a safe, loving home), but of course it is a competition (we want them in our safe, loving home). Even as the number of children coming into care has slowed to a trickle, the number of families waiting for a child has exploded. Case workers are faced with a tsunami of applications (including ours) for every child.
My experience with Covid-19 has not been tainted by the tragedy of a lost loved one. I am fortunate in that regard. Rather, it is a story of mourning what is yet to come. It’s the story of nothing. Of staying home and hoping and breaking my own heart. It is the story I tell my family and friends when they ask how “the adoption thing” is going. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening. There is nothing to say.
This will eventually work out. In the end, my husband and I will be selected as a match and will adopt a child. That is a near certainty. Right now, there is no timeline for that. Whether it is tomorrow or five years from now, we haven’t given up that hope. We are willing to wait.
In the meantime, I worry for my child. They are somewhere out there, this child that I will one day call my own. They are probably in pain and uncertainty right now. I can’t comfort them because we are separated by time and circumstance. I know nothing about them. I can’t decorate their room or buy them clothes. I wish I could talk to them. I wish I could let them know that I already love them.