Now that we’re back in the states with our little boy, I can tell this story about the adoption process that I embargoed for reasons I’ll explain at the end.
So when you’re adopting a kid, you have to go through a whole screening process. They do criminal checks, take fingerprints, stuff like that. Makes sense, right? Also, you have to complete a home study interview, where a social worker comes to your home for like three hours to ask you a bunch of questions about your childhood, your parenting philosophy, whether you’re ready to have a child, etc.
It’s not really an “interview” like a job interview. You already have the “referral” and are pretty far through the adoption process, so it’s really more like a final “red flag” check where the social worker just wants to make sure that you’re not living in filth, that you’re not raising baby-eating snakes, that you don’t have naked pictures of little boys adorning your walls, stuff like that. My guess is that the bar is pretty low — the social worker just wants to make sure that nothing jumps out that indicates that you’d put a child at risk.
I felt pretty confident. We have a nice home, we’re nice people, we showed a commitment to raising a family by leaving the decadent urban Sodom and Gomorrah to come to the land of picket fences and play groups. We’re model parents!
Of course, my wife is crazy. So she treated the interview like it was a “make or break” moment for our adoption, as if we had to be absolutely PERFECT or they might take our baby away. She was running around the house all week cleaning up and straightening out, basically scouring our condo to eliminate any potential sign that we’d be unsuitable parents. Kozy the dog? Groomed and cleaned. Joe the husband? Get a haircut! Dying plant in the hallway? Out you go! No way we’re going to let the interviewer think that we can’t take care of a plant, or she might nix the adoption. She was impossible to live with.
Later that week, we’re sitting down with this very nice woman answering some very predictable questions about us and our personal histories. Essentially, you really only need to make a simple impression: I have no intention of beating my child. Other than that, you pretty much can’t go wrong.
So what happens? We get this question: what is your worst memory as a child? I go first, and I describe how I fell from a tree when I was about eight while I was picking apples with my father, and about how worried and upset he was. I thought it was a pretty good story, all about how much my father cared about me, worried about me, took good care of me, just like — hint! — I’ll take good care of this kid that you’re letting me adopt.
And then my wife starts answering the question, telling us about how her worst memory is about how she was fighting with her sister, and accidentally broke a closet door. So far so good. Then she explains how the bad part of the memory is that her mother spanked her. Ummm, okay, but let’s try to stay away from that whole spanking thing, huh? And THEN she goes on to say that, well, because she’d been so bad and disobeyed her mother, she probably DESERVED IT.
RED FLAG! RED FLAG! RED FLAG!
Okay, it wasn’t that bad. The social worker barely noticed. It’s just that I was hyper-sensitive after watching my wife make our home a dying-plant-free-zone, telling me how important it was to make the right impression, now expressing the rather unorthodox opinion that you can’t blame parents who spank their kids because, you know, sometimes you JUST HAVE TO SMACK THAT KID AROUND A LITTLE TO KEEP HIM IN LINE! It was hilarious. My guess is that if it was okay to say that, we probably could have kept the poor plants.
So my lesson for people adopting a child is simple: don’t do that.
P.S. My wife wouldn’t let me tell that story for the past four months until we were safely back in the states with our boy. To the extent that someone in authority reads this blog, let me state very clearly that we would never, ever, under any circumstances hit a child. So please don’t take my kid away.
