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foster care

Mommy’s Diary 53: Foster Care Registration Process So Far

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My mini sailor, 1 year and 2 months 🙂

Hello! I wanted to do an update on the foster care registration process that Andy and I are in the midst of. As Andy mentioned in the past, we are working on getting approved as an approved “adoption family” while at the same time getting registered as foster care parents. We are also working with a private adoption agency, but for the foster care, we are dealing with the local government. I usually hate dealing with government agencies since they are a slow bureaucratic nightmare, they are not flexible and lack basic communication skills. The child guidance center which we have to deal with for foster care is no exception.

When we first approached the child guidance center to register as foster parents, Kiko was six months old. We took her to our initial interview with the case workers. They complimented us on how well behaved Kiko was and told us that we should NOT be foster parents. The case workers said that they did not want to ruin our “happy family” because the kids in the institutions are full of troubles, badly behaved and socially awkward. Even if they consider us as foster parents, they would not give us any child until Kiko turns at least three and it will be a “weekend visit”, not a long term assignment. We came back home disappointed and angry. Shouldn’t the case workers be on the kids’ sides? How dare they insult the kids when they are suppose to be protect and care for them. I don’t doubt that lot of kids have “problems” since they have some abusive history etc. But, that does not mean that the case workers should flippantly insult the kids in front of the hopeful foster parents!

After the initial interview, we weren’t sure if we should continue  pursuing the foster care option. It sounded like a long arduous fight. But in the end, we decided to push on since Andy said “Don’t take Japanese people’s “no” as an actual “no”. Japanese people will eventually say ‘yes’ if you are persistent enough”. I called back the case worker a couple times and hounded her  until she agreed to allow us to continue the process, which involves taking three group courses. So far, we’ve gone through two out of three, and the last group course is coming up this weekend.

The first group course was terrible. We had to sit in the class room for 6 hours listening to boring lectures on the Japanese orphanage and foster care systems. Most of the info I already knew. They gave us reading materials, so we could have just read it on our own and skipped the lecture. Instead, they felt it was necessary for them to read it out loud to us like we were in elementry school. The topic that bugged me the most was the abuse by foster parents. There were news articles about a foster mother who ended up killing and sexually abusing her assigned little girl. It made me really sad but at the same time, it planted doubt in my mind, “how do I know that I won’t follow the same path?”. I remember coming home all depressed thinking about this. Have you ever thought that maybe it is possible that you end up abusing your kids?

There were five other couples in the course. Those couples depressed me even more. It was obvious that the guys were brought there by their wives unwillingly. Some of them were out right sleeping during the courses. I understand the course was boring, but still. I feel like Andy and I were totally qualified to be foster parents compared to them!!

Daddy’s Diary 7: The More The Merrier!?!?

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Hello VV internet confidantes. I should have had an update recently about my sewing progress but……there is none and there has been no sewing as of late. Ooops!

But in any case, Chie asked me to drop in and update you all with our parental lives. A magazine contacted recently and asked to speak with me. Apparently my skills as  a father have become well known in the community and they wanted to just come talk with me and bask in the glories of my fatherly care. Ok, that isn’t entirely true….but I do think that myself and Chie have done a respectable job raising this here piglet. So my thought on the matter is this, since #1 child is good let’s push our luck a little and try adopting.
Personally,  I have felt adoption was a good and necessary thing for years. It upsets me that it is not done more and astounds me the rarity of adoption here in Japan. I will let Chie take you through some of the cultural Japanese stuff with adoption at some point but basically in Japan adoption is weird, scary and to be avoided ( a little like me I guess). Thankfully, Chie does not fall into the standard category and is all about the adoption process. I don’t remember when we first started talking about adoption but I don’t remember her ever putting up much resistance to the idea. I would be uncomfortable with pulling the trigger on adoption if I had to force Chie kicking and screaming. It is probably a  hard enough venture without having one of the parents opposing the idea.
So, 5,6 months back, Chie and I could see that Kiko was turning out ok with no foreseeable ( as much as one can foresee such things) major physical/developmental problems we started to get that famous parental itch for more children. With Chie swearing off the idea of child birth ever again and literally crying at the mention of doing it again we figured now is the time for adoption. We had always sort of planned on the structure of our family being like this; make a baby, buy a baby, make a baby, buy a baby. 4 in total, 2 conceived and 2 acquired.
So we started contacting local agencies about adoption and foster care (I am interested in doing both but that is a little different and might require its own diary entry). In any case, we contacted 3 agencies to begin with. The first was the local governmental adoption agency. The second was a private group called ISSJ and the third was a private agency named Ai No Kesshin.
The governmental agency is hard to figure out. We first met with them a few months back. We went in for an interview, brought Kiko and were immediately told that our baby was beautiful, growing beautifully, being raised well and they had no interest in working with us for adoption/foster care. They said we had our own baby so would not want some orphan. In their opinions the other child would never be as attractive and wonderful as our child. Needless to say, I was taken aback. 1) I love my daughter but unless I’m missing something she has no angel wings and was not at the time of her birth brought into the world surrounded by a singing chorus of cherubim. She is my daughter and I love her but she is just like the other normal little baby girls born to mothers in the same hospital on the same day, nothing better nothing worse. 2)What in the @#$$%%^?!?! How could these government workers talk so flippantly and cold heatedly about orphaned children in their care? Long story short, they told us “NO”. I told Chie in my particular vernacular “Screw that and screw them who are they to tell me no!” After a few months of back and forth, we are now in the adoption/foster care classes offered by the government. They are still telling us no but in Japan I am pretty sure that “No” is the default answer to every request. Japanese people say no first and ask questions later. The easiest way to deal with this is to ignore them, say “Yes” and usually if your patient you will win the starring contest.
The other two agencies are great. Ai No Kesshin is a Christian org based in a prefecture named Shizuoka. They are not the quickest moving individuals but they are busy so I will cut them some slack. The other org, ISSJ is a Tokyo based social services agency. Both are very easy to work with. We received numerous application forms from Ai No Kesshin this week and have a meeting on Monday with ISSJ. You want to know the highlight of both these agencies? They both are English based services!!!! God bless them. My Japanese still isn’t winning any awards and sitting in the required meetings with the Japanese govt agency is a supreme stretch of my Japanese abilities.
The adoption process in general has been interesting. My parents are cool with the idea. Chie’s parents are coming around to the idea. As I said earlier, the idea of adoption for Japanese folk is weird. It is  especially weird to want to adopt when  (like Chie and I ) you are physically capable of making your own children. I forgot to mention that earlier, the other really weird comment from the Japanese govt agency people was that they told us how the adoption agency and the adoption process was “for couples who could not have their own children or for older couples who wanted to give back to society.” That’s weird, I thought adoption was for, you know, the orphan and for the love of this child here and now.
The adoption agencies keep asking us what “kind” of baby we want. That’s a weird question to answer, as though I’m at McDonald’s ordering  a #4. The questionnaire literally has racial, gender etc criteria that you can check off as  “Yes, I want” or “No, I don’t want”. What kind of ridiculous S.O.B conceives of adopting but then thinks to themselves “No, no a black kid just won’t do.” or “I want his baby to be a male child born of rich parents and genetically predisposed to towards professional athletics.” Ultimately, I am cool with whatever. Chie is also up for anything but seems to really be hoping for a Halfanese. she wants half black/half Japanese or half Filipino/half Jap. The more I think about it the more fun that would be. A few years from now, we all as a family go out to the store, me (very, very, very white), Chie (obviously Japannese), Kiko (some kind of weird mix but looks like me), and then a couple mixed kids who look nothing like Chie or me and are black, dark yellow or some other shade in the rainbow. People would be really confused.
I’m looking at the post, I’ve run a bit long. Sorry about that. I hope to fill you in more soon. What are yours guys’ thoughts on adoption? People usually have strong feeling and would be curious to know what this little global group thinks. If anyone has been through the process and/or been adopted and wants to drop their opinion I would love to hear it.