As hard as it is for me to remember, once upon a time my life was pre-k(ids). This section describes some of the key moments of that life that led up to me shedding the “pre” label, including the intensive training process I went through to get to the next phase. The title also represents how, even with that training, my understanding of what parenting would involve was definitely on the pre-K level … and that was on a good day.

Dipping Toes

There are a few points where you could say our family’s story begins. Here are some background moments that laid the groundwork leading up to the official start of our family saga.

When I was in college in the late 1980s, I took a couple of American Sign Language (ASL) classes. This led to becoming a Big Brother to a boy who attended the Rhode Island School for the Deaf. This stint as a Big lasted for just about a year. I would love to say I was amazing in my first foray into pseudo-parenthood, but I think I’ll have to settle for “pretty good.” Nobody got hurt, but I did manage to almost lose my Little once. (If my Little happens to be reading this, please accept my rapid circular fist rubs on my chest as my apology.)

In addition to being cool enough to offer ASL classes, my university was one of the few that offered an undergraduate teaching credential program. Which meant that, while I was getting my English degree, I also got certified to teach secondary school English—thus doubling my career potential in low-to-no-paying jobs. As part of the credential program, I had two polar-opposite experiences. After my junior year, I taught a class on myth and poetry in a summer program for privileged high school students staying on campus and getting a preview of the college experience. Then, in the first semester of my senior year, I was a student instructor teaching English to freshmen and sophomores at an inner-city high school.

I’m not sure how many of my lessons—including the awesome one that used Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” to teach about poetic verses and refrains—my students got anything out of, but I learned and remembered an extremely valuable one: I like kids. I also learned that, given the choice between the “elite” group and the “underprivileged” one, I’d hang out with the city kids any day. We certainly laughed a lot more.

Moving to California just after graduation, I decided to put these lessons into practice. I worked in group homes for the first year and change, then taught special ed for the next three or so. The stories from those years deserve a book of their own—although they did reassure me that, as far as taking care of kids went, I wasn’t too shabby. (I didn’t even almost lose anyone!)

Then—having exhausted no-pay path number one—I left teaching to pursue writing full-time. And—why not make this as challenging as possible?—I didn’t go for some corporate, or even nonprofit, writing job. Instead, I decided to pursue only meaningful, creative projects. I wrote a ton of poetry (my first writing love), a handful of short stories, even a screenplay or two. I also spent a lot of time temping to pay the occasional bill. Which didn’t prevent me from receiving not one, not two, but three eviction notices for falling behind on rent. This was one of my first memorable experiences of magic, as the money to catch up always seemed to appear just in time.

Being a starving artist didn’t exactly prepare me for parenthood—although it did teach me how to eat on a budget. I spent a few years starving-artist-ing in a little cottage under a big tree, away from schools and group homes. And it wasn’t long before I started really missing being around kids. This led to a new idea: I think I want my own.

So I did the next logical thing: I became a Big Brother once again.

This one was more of a success than my first, brief experience. My (no longer even remotely) Little, Max, has two moms—no typecasting there, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America. The first thing he said when I met him was, “Don’t you think Smokey Robinson was the greatest singer of the sixties?” Max was ten at the time. Smokey Robinson and I have the same birthday. It was love at first sight.

Fast-forward twenty years: Max and I are still in touch, and he and his moms have been family to me and my kids since day one.

A year or so after I met Max, I got pretty serious about having kids of my own. To that end, I jumped from starving-artist-ness to freelancing. This was based on the crazy idea that my future kids might enjoy eating and wearing clothes. It was also based on the idea that if I were going to raise kids by myself, a flexible schedule might come in very handy. (Plus—as anyone who knows me can verify—9-to-5 and I don’t get along very well.) This career switch turned out to be an exercise in very good timing, as this was right at the beginning of the 1990s tech boom. You could contact pretty much any new tech company, tell them you knew how to write, and end up with a contract within an hour or so. And make plenty of money doing so. Adios, eviction notices! 

Agencies

One thing I have learned is that parenting—at least, twenty-first century, urban, middle-class parenting—involves a lot of shopping. And not just the obvious food, clothes, and bandages. If you are or become a parent, you will very well find yourself spending many hours of your life shopping for the right school, the right camp, the right tutor, the right after-school activity, the right . . .

Actually, replace “many hours of your” with “practically your entire.” Now you’re getting warm.

For me, the shopping process began even before I officially became a parent. In 2001, after five years of training with Max—I’m not exactly the world’s fastest mover and shaker—I got to the point where many might say our family’s story really begins. That fall, I decided I was actually going to do this thing: I was going to get some kids. Being smart, as well as gay and single, I realized this translated into: I am going to adopt some kids.

Many parents who want to adopt are looking for newborns or infants. This process can cost upwards of $10,000 and can take months, if not years, of research, planning, travel, and the like. I, on the other hand, knew right away that I wanted older kids. “Older” meaning (a) they could sleep through the night and (b) they knew how to use the toilet. Hey, I know my limits—if I were going to raise a couple of kids by myself, diaper-changing was definitely not on the menu.

Unless you’re doing what’s called a family adoption—taking your niece, nephew, or other relative, or possibly a friend’s kid—adopting older means taking kids who are already in the foster system. To do this, you have two options: working directly with your county Social Services agency, or going through a private agency that specializes in “special needs” adoptions (more on that lovely term later).

I avoided going directly through the county, because I heard horror stories of how overworked the social workers are and how slowly the process moves—people waiting two, three years just to get to the point of looking at potential kids. The joke was on me when another couple I know, who started their process about the same time as I and did go through the county, finalized the adoption with their first son a good six months earlier than mine. So much for conventional wisdom.

In my county-avoiding way, I began attending information sessions for different private adoption agencies in the area. The good news: Pretty much every agency holds such a session, where you can learn the ins and outs of how they operate. The bad: Being me, I felt obligated to attend all of them, which meant hearing pretty much the same thing over and over to the usually large crowd. (Shout out to the good-hearted folks of the East Bay!) Each time, I patiently sat through the spiel: “We love you! We need you! You’re great! We’re great!”

And then I asked my two big questions:

Me: Do you work with single parents?

Me Again: Do you work with LGBTQ parents? (Full disclosure: I probably said “gay and lesbian.” I haven’t always been Mr. Informed and Evolved.)

The responses I got went something like this:

Agency: Uhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . sure we do.

Other Agency: Ummmmmmmm . . . yes . . . we do that. Still Other Agency: Single . . . gay . . . lesbian . . . ummm . . . yeah.

Call me crazy, but that’s a lot of “ummm.”

Finally, at orientation number five? six? I asked the same questions. This time, I got: “Oh, of course! Our director is a lesbian! We love working with LGBT families!”

Sold. And we were on our way.

Training

As I mentioned, adopting older kids generally means getting kids who are in the foster care system. This, in turn, means that your first step to adoption is becoming a foster parent. Why? Because even though it takes a while to become a foster parent (I’ll explain more in a minute), the process of sending a kid from one foster home to another is much faster than transitioning from a foster home to an adoptive placement—which can take months, if not years.

There’s a lot of legal mumbo jumbo involved, but the bottom line is that this process let me bring the kids to our home about ten months before we signed the papers in court changing their last names. I’ll take it.

What does this have to do with training? Pretty much everything. If I had decided to adopt a kid outright—whether a $10,000 infant or my neighbor’s son—the law would require me to have this much training: none. This might ring a bell for anyone who has birthed a child biologically: a night of passion, ten months, boom. And the in vitro crowd doesn’t even get the passion.* But in either case, zero training required. Apparently, when kids can trace their origins back to your egg or sperm, you can feed them Cheetos 24/7 and have them sleep on the roof, and no one minds much.

(*I’ve always felt bad for St. Joseph about that. Raising a kid without the fun part of making it. The original adoptive parent.)

Being a foster parent? At least in California, this involves forty hours of mandatory training. Forty hours, lots and lots of rules and regulations: All meds must be locked up, kids need a separate bedroom with a door, and many more that I’ve forgotten or suppressed over the years. Apparently, foster children are much more prone to trouble— and sleepwalking—than their biological or adopted counterparts.

I signed up for fost-adopt training at our agency in January 2002, and it started in March. The trainings were either twice a week for eight weeks, or four weekends in a row, or something like that—I don’t really remember. I do remember that I was the only prospective parent among the thirty-odd people in the room who was both single and gay. In retrospect, I have to laugh at myself for being surprised at how many couples were there. Being nestled in my alterna-bubble, I honestly forgot that most people who consider having children are in couples, and most of those couples include one woman and one man. There are a lot of straight parents in the world! There were, however, one or two single women, and—much to my relief—one gay couple, Jim and Chris (as in Christopher, not Christine).

In training, one of the first things you learn is the definition of a special needs child. This includes, believe it or not, a child with a diagnosed special need such as a physical, emotional, or developmental disability. However, again at least in California, it also includes the following:

* Any child over two
* Any child who is not white
* Any siblings

So, yeah: You could fost-adopt a future president of the United States, and if he or she is three, or Latino, or has a sister who’s also in foster care, that child is special needs. I actually hit the trifecta: My kids were both over two and not white and part of a sibling set. Yahtzee! The good news is, the county gives you a (meager, but every penny counts) monthly stipend for these “special” kids, up to age eighteen. The bad news is . . . really?

Anyway, other things you learn in training include the following:

* How to discipline
* How not to discipline
* All the attachment disorders you can expect to see
* How there’s a good chance you won’t see these disorders until your kid hits puberty
* The honeymoon
* How not to be fooled by the honeymoon
* What to do when the honeymoon ends—probably much sooner and more abruptly than seems reasonable

But the actual training is only the beginning. After you put in your forty hours, the real fun begins. If you’ve gone through the fost-adopt process, I apologize in advance for what I’m about to describe, and the nightmares it might trigger.

I’m referring, of course, to the home study. As the name implies, the home study takes place in your home. Our agency worker visited my new house* several times, explaining what I needed to have in the house, what I was not allowed to have, what fixes and other upgrades I needed to make, and other home-related issues that are legally required for the house to qualify as a foster home. So far, so good.

What also happens in the home study is that you are interviewed and analyzed in a way that puts the NSA to shame. Easy stuff: Whether you smoke, drink, or do other drugs, and how often. Harder stuff: How you would describe your childhood and your own parents’ parenting styles. Stuff you really don’t want to talk about: How your childhood relationship with your parents affects your adult relationships, and any examples. All of this grilling causes you to discover your own attachment issues. You (well, not me—cold fish, remember?) then spend a lot of time crying about them.

(*Unfortunately, my little cottage under the big tree wouldn’t cut it as a foster home—not enough bedrooms, for starters. On the other hand, being forced to jump into the housing market did give me a solid first experience of what would become a recurring theme of parenthood: going into debt.)

Assuming you can drag yourself back to training while surviving the home study, you will hear a very important message, repeatedly: how you need to build a support group. Folks who will step in and take over when you’re absolutely sure you are going to go crazy/postal/on a one-way flight to anywhere. The trainers couldn’t emphasize this enough, yet it turns out they didn’t emphasize it enough. My own thought, years later, is that no one should be allowed to adopt unless you can show the agency/county the names of twenty people who agree to step in at times of need. And then the agency/county needs to meet with all of these people and get their agreement in writing, including alternative contact phone numbers. Six or ten or fifteen is not enough—it’s amazing how your friends can all seem to have weekend plans at the same time. And how, after they spend one night with your kids, their social lives all seem to spike dramatically.

Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.

Finding My Kids

Now we’re getting to the good stuff.

I decided pretty early in my process that I wanted siblings, preferably boys. Siblings, because I figured that being adopted by a single gay guy might bring up plenty of stuff, so at least the kids would have each other to share the experience with. Also, a sibling set gave each kid a built-in playmate who—to the relief of both of us—would not always need to be me. Boys, because I was thinking ahead to puberty. I know my limits, and the idea of dealing with a teenage girl—or, worse, girls—made my hair stand on end and skin break out in a cold sweat. At least with boys, I could rely on the fact that I had once been a teenage boy. Which was basically a five-year nightmare—so if nothing else, it gave me a baseline for how to help my kids have an opposite-of-Dad experience.

I finished all the requirements of my training, house upgrades, and home study/psychoanalysis by the end of October 2002. That’s when the magic kicked in in a big way.

In mid-November, I went to the adoption agency office and sat in a room with a large conference table covered in binders. Each binder represented a California county, and inside each binder were (very brief, sketchy) profiles for all of the foster kids up for adoption in that county. The binders were divided into three sections: boys, girls, and siblings.

(There were other ways to look for or at kids at the time: websites, a community TV program, even picnics that gathered available foster children and invited prospective parents to meet, greet, and evaluate—sort of like adoption speed-dating. I couldn’t even imagine walking through all of those kids in person and having to note “maybe them, or them, definitely not them,” etc.—especially older kids who would know exactly what was going on. Binders seemed a lot safer.)

The rules for looking through the binders were simple. As you go through, you are to flag any potential matches with a post-it note. The agency worker then contacts the county worker for each of those kids or sibling sets and sends the worker a brief bio of the prospective parent (me).

After this point, the process is out of your hands. Each county worker makes a decision whether they think you (the prospective parent) are a good fit for the kid or kids in question. If so, the county worker replies to the agency worker and sets up a meeting. Again, similar to dating, it’s basically a numbers game: If you want a match, flag lots of potential kids. There’s no commitment at this point.

Back in the room, I took a deep breath and grabbed the binder for my own county. I ideally wanted local kids. This was based on the thinking that being adopted by a single gay guy might be enough of a major transition. I was hoping we could at least minimize the impact of the actual physical move.

OK, so I have my county binder, and I open to the siblings section. And there they were: my kids. They were the very first picture I saw, and I knew right away they were the ones. Yes, I’m typically one of those gut-instinct people. But this was gut instinct times infinity.

I flagged their page and probably could have called it a day right there. But being a trooper, I stayed for another hour or so doing my due diligence, flagging other possible candidates—including a few trios of two brothers and a sister. As I’ll say more about later, I’m kind of programmed to play by the rules.

For most people, here’s what normally happens next in the process: You wait a month, or two, or six. If you’re lucky, calls trickle in from various county workers. For any given kid or kids, you set up an initial meeting with just you, your agency worker, and the county worker. This usually leads to two or three more meetings. Then, between the workers and the current foster parent, you work out an initial visit with the kids. Assuming the first one is a hit, you make any number of follow-up visits, gradually moving toward sleepovers and more extended stays. At some point, you and the kids are separately asked, “Do you want to make this permanent?” (The kid version is probably worded slightly differently. Unless the question is being asked of the fost-adopt version of Alfred Einstein—or Sherlock Einstein, as he was known in our house. More on that later, also.) If all parties say yes, you officially become a foster family on the road to adoption. This process generally takes about a year, although it’s not uncommon for it to go to two years and beyond.

Here’s what happened to the boys and me: The day after my post-it party at the office, my kids’ county social worker, Amy, contacted my agency worker, Heather. The next week, we had our meeting. Within two weeks, we started visits.

I found out later that none of the other county workers ever bothered to call back.

Next Chapter: Meetup