A deeper look

Karen again. I will probably be the primary voice for this blog. (No surprise to those of you who know me.)

Nicole and I thought it might be helpful to give a little background information on each of us so that some of what we write about makes more sense. Sometimes it is easier to understand why we think/act the way we do or why certain things are important, etc, if you know a bit of the background story, so we will go a little deeper than the basic introduction from a few days ago.

I will start with me. I was born in 1963. I was raised in Atlanta by my biological parents until their divorce when I was about 8 or 9. My dad remarried and then passed away from cancer when I was 12. My mom remarried when I was 15 and the family moved to New Jersey. My childhood was marked by repeated episodes of sexual abuse at the hands of three different men. I medicated my anger and shame with food as a young girl and my weight fluctuated from mildly overweight to morbidly obese. In high school, I added alcohol to the arsenal and I struggled with bouts of depression. My mother's marriage was volatile and uncomfortable and alcohol featured prominently in everything in their lives. I did not feel loved, accepted or valuable and I was very confused and conflicted about love, sexuality and family.

In high school, I spent a summer in Japan as an exchange student. This experience really changed my perspective on what it meant to be a citizen of the world. It also changed how I respond to people who look, think, behave, worship, eat, speak, dress, etc, differently than I do. It taught me to love and embrace diversity, to meet people as individuals, to judge them by their characters, to look for what we share in common and to respect their right to live as they choose. It taught me that, although I think America is a wonderful country, it is not the ONLY wonderful country in the world and that in some areas, we have a LOT to learn.

After high school, I spent two years at the University of Georgia. The biggest lessons I learned there didn't come from the books or the professors. I learned a lot about being Karen and I learned that Karen was a lesbian and that being a lesbian was OK. I learned that a good therapist is a VERY valuable thing and that not all therapists are good. I learned that I had a LOT still to learn.

Trying to grow up in the midst of sexual abuse, divorce, the death of a parent, alcohol abuse, relocation.....your development becomes kind of chaotic. Pieces get missed. You are forced to develop beyond your years while at the same time missing developmental milestones that got lost along the rocky road. To say that I struggled as a young adult is an understatement.

I went through several bad relationships and in a strange twist of fate and a stunning betrayal, I became pregnant at 23. My mother had divorced her abusive husband and moved to Florida with my oldest sister and her children, so I moved to Florida as well. I needed the support, and as screwed up as my family was, it was still my family. I wanted to be a good mother more desperately than I had ever wanted anything in my whole life. I wanted to raise a child who NEVER felt a moment's doubt about how loved and wonderful they were. I put all of my feelings about my own sexuality and my own past on hold and concentrated on loving my child. I learned to live without medicating myself with alcohol. I did not manage to do that with food.

I raised my son in an environment that says everyday that you are good and valuable and cherished. I learned a lot about healing myself as I raised him. Most importantly, as I watched that beautiful, innocent child grow, I learned that no child ever deserves to be exploited or abused and that the abuses that happened to me as I was growing up were not my fault. I protected him fiercely and loved him even more fiercely. I made a lot of mistakes. He loved me anyway. I did a LOT of things right and in doing them, I began to re-write the internal monologue that told me who I was.

I spent a good number of years in a church that told me gay people go to hell and insisted that God would make me straight if I only asked him sincerely enough. After nine years of the most earnest prayer possible I realized that while God had spoken to my heart about a lot of things, He had never taken issue with my sexual orientation. I chose to believe the God I had built a relationship with over my pastor and I left the church. Today, I am a Unitarian Universalist and I enjoy a deep faith and rich spiritual life.

After I reconciled myself with God concerning my sexual orientation, I spent a number of years feeling that perhaps I was bisexual. Looking back, I think it was my attempt at trying to have a life that I could live openly in society, because while I had come to a comfortable place spiritually regarding being gay, socially it was a whole different thing. I live in a very conservative state. There are no protections in my area for LGBT people regarding discrimination in housing, employment, etc. It is very difficult to talk "around" your personal life. People want to know and if you are vague or cagey with them, they can be really crappy to you. SO, while I was still living in that space in my head, I met and married a man. Oddly enough, I told him the day I met him that I was lesbian. The marriage had many more problems than me trying to force my lesbian square peg self into the round hole of a heterosexual marriage, and the combined issues led us to divorce (amicably) four years later. Again, I learned a LOT about myself from that experience and I also gained a lovely daughter, Tara. There has been a tremendous investment in parenting her that has benefited us both in more ways than I can count. She was a teenager when we met and through her I learned how to respect the person she already was while still nurturing and teaching her the things she needed to learn. It was good for both of us. Still is!

I have been a nurse for 22 years. For the last 11 years I have worked as a private duty pediatric nurse. I work with kids who have complex medical needs and who require a nurse at night, so I am one of those graveyard shift nurses. The schedule plays hell with my personal life, but for now it solves more problems than it creates.

I re-use, re-purpose and recycle. I try to conserve resources. I take issue with how we treat meat animals in this country, but I am not vegetarian. I choose to buy meat from sources that practice humane and responsible animal husbandry. I think how we treat the planet and ALL of its inhabitants speaks to who we are as people. I root for the underdog. I shop mom and pop businesses and spend extra to buy things made from recycled materials or by local sources, etc. I am a liberal and a pacifist. I talk too much and am sometimes a bit of a know it all. I hate this about myself. I also struggle with control issues. I am uncomfortable when I don't know what to expect. Sometimes I am bossy. I have a lousy edit feature and struggle with what information to leave in and what to leave out, even in simple instructions.

Around the house, I love to cook. Nicole and I are cupcake and cake bakers/decorators and sometimes a LOT of our schedule happens around creating cakes/cupcakes for someone's event. When I have time, I create beautiful stone bead and precious metal jewelry.

So, that's me. Now on to Nicole. She had a much more stable life than I did, so her story is, accordingly, much shorter. (It's ok, you can say Thank GOD out loud. It wouldn't hurt my feelings even if I could hear you.)

Nicole was born in 1981 (the year I graduated high school, which has become the punch line to a lot of jokes in our lives.) She was raised here in north Florida by her biological parents, who are loving, nurturing and stable people. She was always taught, by both word and deed, that she was valuable and wonderful and loved. Her parents were childhood sweethearts who have remained completely in love with each other throughout their marriage and it was in this environment that Nicole learned about loving a partner and parenting children.

Nicole's mom has the most amazing ability to make someone feel welcome and wanted. She listens to and observes EVERYTHING without you even noticing it and then she delights in surprising people she loves with something that is just the right thing for them. Nicole's dad is quiet. He does not speak often...never engages in idle chit chat. But he is a generous natured and hard working man and if he ever suspects that you need help with something, he is right there to do whatever he can to help and he almost makes you feel like you are doing him a favor for letting him help you. They are wonderful people and they raised a wonderful daughter.

Nicole married her first serious boyfriend a couple of years after she graduated high school. She went straight from her parents' home to their shared home. Her husband was eight years her senior, but completely unable to care for himself. He struggled to remain steadily employed. The marriage was difficult and ended after eight years. During the time they were married, Nicole not only worked full time to support them, but also put herself through college and got a bachelor's degree.

Nicole is a talented artist, although she will deny that any time I mention it. She has a keen eye for design and rearranges the furniture with an almost maddening frequency. The only thing more maddening than the frequency of her redecorating is the fact that it always looks so nice that I can't complain about it!

She has her mother's talent for listening and observing and then surprising you with just the right thing at just the right moment. She has very strong ethics about how you do and do not treat people and she will not abide rudeness. She has a wicked sense of humor and is quick to find the humor in things and has a talent for making people laugh. She is not above doing something silly to make people laugh, because she knows who she is. She is tender hearted beyond words.

Then there is our Lisa. Lisa is brave, funny, complicated, sweet and MOODY! The first six years of Lisa's life were spent bouncing from birth mom to aunt to grandmother and back again. Her birth mother was unstable and frequently left her unattended, even as a VERY young child and Lisa was exposed to drug use and sexual activity. Lisa is the youngest of five children. Of the other four, three had been removed and were adopted as a group prior to Lisa's birth. The other child was back and forth between foster homes and extended family members' homes. The two of them never lived together and saw each only rarely.

At six, Lisa was removed by the state and went to live with extended family. Two years later, she was taken into foster care. It is unclear how many foster homes Lisa lived in prior to her first adoption. At the age of 8, Lisa was adopted by a single mother who was a member of a very stringent religion. Lisa was sent to bible study and church where she was taught that physical violence was wrong only to come home and be beaten. Lisa endured a very difficult 15 months before the adoption was terminated and she was again taken into foster care. There was another series of foster homes, one after the other, until Lisa was finally placed in a group home to try to gain some stability. The group home was stable, but it was a religiously based organization. Given her prior experiences of being forced to attend church and her confusion about God and religion, it was not a good match for Lisa. She felt unwanted and that feeling was reinforced by a cool and distant house mother. LIsa's grades plummeted and she became severely depressed. She refused to talk about her past and was emotionally completely shut down.

We were told when we went to meet Lisa that she would most likely not make eye contact with us. We were warned that it would take an extended amount of time to gain her trust and for her to speak to us without being prompted and even longer to get anything more than "yes, no, fine or I don't know" out of her. Happily, this was not the case. She felt the same feelings of "this is my family" about us that we felt about her. That is not to say that the moment we met she told us all about her life and her feelings and there has not been great difficulty, but the sense between all of us that we were meant to be together has certainly been a HUGE factor in helping Lisa to make strides towards over coming the effects of her childhood trauma.

You're only as old as your teenager thinks you are...

Karen here!

So, I used to have long hair. Really long hair. I had really long hair for a lot of years and I really loved it. It made me feel younger somehow. Silly, I guess, but it did. The closer I get to 50, the more often I find myself experiencing those wonderful "personal tropical vacations" that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with sipping some delicious frozen drink whilst swaying in a hammock strung between two palm tress and listening to the waves and EVERYTHING to do with sweating profusely whilst feeling like a kernel of popcorn just about to combust! So last October, with much trepidation and more than a little anxiety, I headed off to a salon to have my locks shorn to a length that might help prevent the near homicidal panics that accompany that kind of internal, infernal inferno. One VERY short hair cut later and I started feeling much more like my old self.

Things around our house have been a bit hectic lately. Nicole and I have been in a baking frenzy. We make cakes and cupcakes and this past month has been everyoneweknows birthday. On Saturday, we finished off a heavily decorated three layer 12" red velvet cake that weighed over 20 pounds and contained enough batter for 72 cupcakes! I haven't had a lot of time to worry about my hair and it had gotten a bit long. Lisa, our 17 year old, had started to make comments about the state of my hair, so this morning I made an appointment to get my hair cut. Lisa was spending the afternoon and evening with her Meimei and Poppy (Nicole's parents), so I was hoping to surprise her with a mom that looked a bit more put together when we went to pick her up after dinner.

When we arrived at the salon, Jaime, my stylist, and I had the same crazy idea. Let's damn near shave one side of my head and do this cute, piecey, layered thing on the other side. It's an asymmetrical cut that is fairly popular right now and it wears equally well on the very young and the somewhat more aged crowd. I was SO excited. I was sure that Lisa was going to be tickled that I had chosen a hairstyle that wouldn't make her need to walk 10 paces ahead of or behind me when we went someplace.

The cut is cute! Nicole LOVES it! I love it. Even Meimei really liked it and thought looked cute.

Lisa says, "Wow, Mom.....look at all that GRAY!"

The hair color is on the counter.......

Getting Started

I suppose the best way to get started is with an introduction and we will get to that in a minute, but before we do, there is something you should know. Our intent in this blog is to be as real and as transparent as we possibly can. You might, from time to time, encounter some language you don't use. It isn't our intention to offend, just to be real. We tell it like it is. If we come on here and try to portray our family, our struggles, our happy times, our goofiness, our frustrations and the like as anything other than what they really are, we might as well not even bother. We are far from perfect and sometimes we are a downright mess, but we are who we are and maybe something that we find our way through will be helpful to someone. We hope so. We feel passionately about our family and what it has taken to create it. There are many things we have gone through that shouldn't have been so hard. Maybe one day some of the stumbling blocks in the path will be removed, but in the meantime, if you are travelling along any of the paths we have walked, maybe we can help each other.

So, about that introduction; we are Karen and Nicole. We are a lesbian couple and we have three kids between us. We met in October of 2008 and were legally married in D.C. on our second anniversary, October 11, 2010. Karen is 48. Nicole is 31. Coming in to the relationship, Karen had an adult son, Clark, who she raised as a single mother and an adult daughter, Tara, (technically a step-daughter from a previous marriage to a man, but we don't feel or use the term "step".) Nicole had no children and the general consensus between us when we met and up until the time of our marriage is that we were not interested in having any more children. This was not a difficult position for us at the time, because at that time it was not legal for LGBT folks in the state of Florida to adopt. Additionally, neither of us was really interested in or even probably capable of carrying a pregnancy. And then there is always the sticky issue of where to get the other half of the genetic material we would need, so no kids it was!

In the months before we married, we had some discussions about the possibility of becoming foster parents. It was something we both felt was an important thing to do and that we had always felt kind of drawn towards, but neither of us had ever been in a position before where we felt emotionally supported enough to actually move forward with that. In the month directly before we married, a landmark court case here in Florida overturned the ban on lesbian, gay and bisexual adoptions. We were thrilled, but in that moment it was more of a celebratory feeling that our community had gained some much needed equality and that children who desperately needed parents would now have that chance. We were so caught up in the preparations for our upcoming weddings (one with family and friends here in Florida that was not legally recognized and one in D.C. with just a handful of people that was legal) that we couldn't foresee how deeply that court case would impact us in such a short time.

So we married. And then we married again! We came back home and went back to work and reveled in the amazing joy of being legally wed. October went and November came and with it the distraction and bustle of the upcoming holiday season. There was so much to do! Thanksgiving was on us before we knew it. It was different for us this time. We were a family, legally recognized (at least in several states and the District of Columbia, anyway), and it felt different to us. It is more than just a piece of paper and even when you live in a state where your marriage is not legally recognized, your friends and family DO view your relationship differently when you have taken that step. Something was happening inside us, inside how we defined ourselves as a couple and as a family, but we were not really consciously aware of it at the time.

We did what everyone else does at Thanksgiving. We tried to figure out how to celebrate with both sides of the family without making anybody mad. We ate WAY too much food. We laughed and we drank wine and we felt whole and happy and very lucky. December came. In mid December, Karen's niece and her husband had a baby girl. Nicole doesn't subscribe to the belief that all babies are beautiful, even to the point that she finds most babies a little odd looking, but this baby took her breath away. She really was the most beautiful and amazing little princess. We visited them at home shortly after the baby was born. Nicole sat in a recliner in the corner and watched and then something happened that would change the course of our lives in an instant. Someone handed that baby to Nicole and the entire room watched as Nicole just melted. In that instant, the thing that had been changing on the inside of us over the last few months was born. Nicole wanted to be a mother and she wanted to become a mother by adoption. Gone were the days of being trapped in a loveless, difficult marriage with a partner who couldn't be responsible even for his own self, much less a child. Gone was the struggle of coming out and living fully as who you truly are. Gone were the days of having to do everything for and by yourself with no support. And gone was the legal block to adoption by lesbians. Nicole sat there, holding that baby, transfixed...and in the quiet of that moment, everything changed.

In January, we began the process of adoption by doing an Internet search for available foster children in the state of Florida. It led us to a website, capbook.org, where pictures and bios of available kids from several states were listed. Like probably most other couples, we had thought that we would be looking for a young child; preschool age or maybe a toddler. A good friend of ours who had adopted a child already had told us that when we found "our child", we would just know, but we were skeptical. So, there we were one evening, Karen at work and Nicole at home, talking via Skype and going through the listings of kids on capbook.org. The kids were listed by age groups, so we started with the youngest kids and went from there. There were lots of interesting kids on the site, but nothing was really clicking. And then, all of the sudden, there she was. As soon as we saw her we knew that what our friend had told us was right. THIS was our child. We knew that we knew that we knew that this was OUR daughter, OUR Lisa. It was quite a shock to us, because this child was already 16 years old. It was certainly NOT what we had thought we were looking for, but it didn't matter. She was ours and whatever that meant, we were committed.

From that moment, it was about nine months of crazy before we were able to meet our daughter. On December 15, 2011, we all stood in court together and she became legally ours. Well, that is not entirely correct. She became legally Karen's, because although the court case in Sept 2010 cleared the way for gay persons to adopt, it did not change the fact that unmarried couples in the state are not allowed to adopt a child out of the foster system together, and since our marriage is not legally recognized here, only one of us was allowed to become our daughter's legally recognized parent at that time. We are pursuing a second parent adoption, but that will not be final for another few months and has to be done privately. Lisa was less than six months from turning 18 the day the adoption finalized. She will have already turned 18 before the second parent adoption finalizes. It's a bit of a crazy ride adopting a child that close to being an adult.

So, in a nutshell, this is what we will be blogging about: LGBT marriage equality issues; LGBT adoption, family and custody matters; older child adoptions; adopting a child who has been in foster care for a VERY long time; trans-racial adoptions; and over coming a history of abuse. (Both Lisa and Karen have experience with those issues.)

Sometimes Karen will write and sometimes it will be Nicole. We will try to remember to identify who is speaking in each post. Feel free to ask questions and we will try to answer as quickly and as honestly as we can, but please understand that in the interest of protecting our family and the emotional work we are doing, there may be some questions we can't answer publicly and some we may not be able to answer at all.

We hope this has some greater purpose than just recording history and providing some catharsis for us, but it will be whatever it will be. As Lisa so often says, "I know....right?"