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?"