Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love Read Online Free Page B

is a lot to do, but it’s worth so much in the long run. Bernie and I learned a lot in the MAPP classes. Before we went, we thought that after five kids, we knew it all.
     
    The Home Study is extensive, as it should be. The state is entrusting you with a life and can’t just take your word for it that you’re adopting out of the goodness of your heart or that you are stable, have an adequate home, and are financially prepared to raise a child. It’s too bad there are no requirements like that before people get pregnant.
     
    We were fingerprinted and had criminal background checks. Happily, all of us had clean records, and the state didn’t unearth any rattling skeletons in our closet worse than making mistakes in our previous spouses. We had to get reference letters from neighbors, relatives, and our pastor. We had to produce copies of our divorce papers, which was a problem for Bernie because he had burned his, so he had to contact records offices in California to get proof that he was not a bigamist.
     
    The adoption officials made home visits, called our employers, checked our financial records, and interviewed all of the kids many times, as well as their teachers and employers and the people who wrote letters on our behalf. The older boys were getting irritated, but Willie just got more excited as it began to seem real to him. Steven was closest to him in age, but he was still ten years older. Willie thought he would have a playmate, someone to go on bike rides through the neighborhood and go to the beach and play board games with.
     
    When the Home Study and the MAPP classes are finished, and you are ready to start considering children, there is a checklist to go over. Would you take an African American child, a blind child, a mixed-race child, a disabled child, an older child? All of these are called special needs children and are harder to place. We knew we wanted an older child, and we thought the color of his or her skin would be such a small thing, compared to what so many of these children have been through.
     
    The adoption officials had told us to be very aware of birth order. We didn’t want to bring a child into the home who was older than Willie. We definitely didn’t want a baby. We wanted a child we wouldn’t have to potty train and who would sleep through the night. We didn’t want a child who had been sexually abused or who was severely mentally challenged. So much of what we were looking for—in fact, most of what we were looking for—was based on how Willie would interact with that child and how it would affect him.
     
    I became obsessed with looking at available children online. It seems like an odd way to do it, searching online for a child as if you were looking for a car or a boat or a dog. But it’s become the norm, and it’s actually very informative and practical. A lot of kids sounded promising, but then we’d make further inquiries and find out they couldn’t be around other children or around animals. One little girl we asked about—who looked like an angel—had gone through several disrupted adoptions and was sent back to the agency because she consistently attacked the mother in every home. She had issues with other females. We found siblings—seven and eight years old—who seemed great online, but we found out they had been sent to homes and had come back five times. There was another girl who urinated all over the furniture whenever she got upset. There were other kids who mistreated or tortured animals.
     
    Some of the kids had already spent time in mental hospitals. Others had been through so much that they would never be able to function as normal members of society. It is heartbreaking, but you have to protect the family you have.
     
    We were getting discouraged. We became more open on some conditions and more opposed to others. Some of the answers on our checklist changed from no to maybe and some from maybe to no. Some yeses became maybes.
     
    Then we got a