Social Essays

Alisa and Luis have a loving and warm blended family. Tommy, Luis’ teenaged son, is a senior in high school and attends an accelerated college program; Ethan is nine and lives with his mother on the east coast except for extended summer and holiday visitations, and their daughter Gracie is now seven. Years ago, Alisa went through the process of legally adopting Tommy, and together the couple went through arduous negotiations to get joint legal custody of Ethan. They talked of adopting a child from the beginning of their relationship in 1999. Gracie began wishing and praying for a little sister almost from the time she could talk and she became an integral part of the family’s decision to try to adopt a child close to Gracie’s age. They looked into various options, initially attempting in 2004 to adopt a child from Puerto Rico, where Luis grew up. Finances and the difficulties inherent in adoptions from Puerto Rico without having residency there, made the family decide to examine the adoption options available closer to home, and they hoped for a child with a Hispanic background to fit within their family. They decided that they needed to find a child who was young and not too badly traumatized for the sake of Gracie and the rest of their family.

Alisa began educating herself about how the system worked, looked through hundreds of heartbreaking cases, and enrolled them in the very first step…the 4-hour foster parent orientation class. Afterwards, they began the daunting task of filling out required paperwork, going through multiple home study interviews and classes to qualify themselves as foster adoptive parents. They quickly found the system heavily biased to encourage parents to foster rather than adopt, and that having a good social worker was essential not only for navigating the system but for finding the right child for their family.