Mom & Pop Home School

No, nothing earth shattering. Sorry to have gotten your hopes up. However…

Today I got a call from the guy who did our homestudy. I’m feeling somewhat more kindly disposed toward him after our conversation. He is finally (I know, but the wheels of bureaucracy are notoriously slow and understaffed, so what’re ya gonna do?) gotten a chance to sit down and do some revisions on our homestudy. He had to check with the licensing office about procedures and was told that unless there’s something fairly major that changes they don’t usually allow alterations before the 1 year relicensing hooplah. But they’re making an exception and allowing him to make some few revisions. He sounded a bit sheepish about the typo where Cricket was born a month after we were married, and will definitely change that, but he wanted to call and see what our other concerns were. Wasn’t that nice of him? He coulda just made a quick revision and left it at that. So I explained a little about the kinds of feedback we’d gotten from people who’d reviewed our homestudy, and what some of our concerns were. He says that he can see how someone who was reading it completely out of context would maybe be a little confused about some things like the bugs (ex. yes we do some unusual things to support our children in their interests, but no, we don’t have giant cockroaches roaming free in the kitchen, and you don’t even have to look at the durn things if you don’t want to; seriously, we’d be willing to ditch the invertebrates if necessary to make a new child feel comfortable!).  He says he understands our concern about the summary of what the school psychologist said, and will add a paragraph explaining our perspective on that. He may expand on a few other things as well, with the idea that the thing will be read by lots of people who have not met our family and have no background information to put these kinds of things in perspective. So, thanks for your help, M. Hopefully it’ll do some good as we continue down this road. If not, well, we’ll see what happens when we hit our one year mark and get relicensed. And can start making out of state inquiries.

And on we go!

I know some of you are wondering.

When last I wrote about this we were strongly considering working with a private adoption agency to get a new homestudy done. After taking a few weeks to cool off, we’ve changed our minds and decided just to wait out the year and see what happens. But we reserve the right to change up our minds again at any moment without notice.

Getting a new homestudy done is not a speedy or painless process. It involves not just the interviews and home inspection stage, but takes us all the way back to the beginning. We’d have to redo background checks, physician clearances, references, paperwork proving that we’re legally married and financially stable, and all that jazz. By the time it was all over with we’d be pretty close to hitting our year mark anyway. When we do, we’ll be able to have our homestudy updated, probably by the person who normally does it rather than the guy we got stuck with before, which would hopefully enable us to clarify some of the things that annoy us in the current version. We knew this would likely be a long and drawn-out process when we started it, so this is not particularly surprising, even if it is frustrating.

Also, as the children we already have get older, so does the age range of children we’d be best able to integrate into our family. This is a good thing in that in foster care there are more children available for adoption in the older age ranges than in the younger. So if we wait another year, there will be a bigger pool of children for whom we can be considered.

We’ve also been muttering about moving again, and didn’t want to start anything as big as a new homestudy with a different agency until a decision had been made regarding whether we were even going to be living in this state when it was finished. If we move to another state, we will likely have to start all over again. At this point it looks like we’re probably not going to move anytime soon, but we may begin sorting through our junk and getting organized so that when we do decide it’s time to go it won’t be such a daunting project.

We trust that God will send us the right child at the right time, and we’ll be patient and ride out the process until it happens. But we don’t want to get too obsessive about it all either. Life marches on a little at a time.

I listened to this talk today and enjoyed the sentiments expressed. I haven’t found a transcript, but here’s an audio link: 

http://byubmp3.byu.edu/wconf/2001/5/JDToronto.mp3

It’s from a 2001 Women’s Conference at BYU. A Brother and Sister Toronto (no, I’d never heard of them either) share some interesting insights on interfaith relationships.

 I have a few more minutes now, which I think I will use in continuing my earlier thoughts about marriage in the context of the recent turmoil surrounding Proposition 8 in California. As I said earlier, to me this is a complex subject without easy answers. In our society we like to view problems in terms of what will fit in a headline or on a protest sign. We like our answers in sound bite-sized chunks. That way we don’t have to actually spend time thinking about the intricacies of human existence. We can just slap a “them” label on whoever subscribes to the other slogan and get on with the fun of drawing battle lines. But life doesn’t really happen as news clips. It happens in long, drawn out complexities of belief, doubt, action, indecision, apathy an emotion. It happens as life. And life is just not that easy. At least not to me.

I have heard some people say in effect, “Marriage is just a civil contract. Why can’t those religious people just keep their noses out of it.” In my earlier post I touched on this a little. Marriage was not invented by the government of the state of California, and then usurped by religious zealots in that state and turned into a fancy religious ceremony. Marriage has a vast historical context that predates the government of California, and indeed the government of the United States by thousands of years. It existed before the government that wants to regulate and alter it came into being, and will, in my opinion, exist on into time after California has crumbled into the ocean and the United States has passed into history (as hard as that is for us to imagine that in this instant on the time line of eternity). The concept of marriage as a religious practice extends beyond the chronology and indeed the geography of the United States government. In some ways I think it’s arrogant for a single state government to presume to claim such a behemoth as its vassal, to reduce it to a mere piece of paper with a fancy embossed seal that makes it officially binding. Indeed, I think that many people in our society place their signatures on such a document without the foggiest notion before, or after, of what marriage actually is and in doing so invalidate the “marriage” even as they move the pen across the paper. They have a civil contract, yes, but does that really constitute a marriage? Does a blueprint constitute a shrine? Is the marriage the piece of paper, or is it the edifice that the piece of paper is intended to assist in constructing? (more…)

 The uproar over Proposition 8 in California, which defines marriage as between a man and woman only, has been thought-provoking for me on a number of levels, many of which I find difficult to put into words. I see a sad irony in signs that read “Stop The Hate” being waved by angry people shouting insults and threats; in mob violence and intimidation perpetrated in the name of love; in sacred books being burned on the thresholds of places of worship in the name of tolerance; in blacklists being circulated to encourage acceptance; in terrorist tactics such as anthrax scares being used to assert civil rights by stopping religious observances. Clearly the issue of gender in marriage is one that draws strong feelings from us, whatever position we take. I am disappointed by those on both sides of the issue who demonize those with opposing points of view. Civilized people should be able to respectfully disagree. Mature adults should be able to come to reasonable resolutions that allow amicable coexistence of differing factions. Instead, our society is engaged in finger-pointing and name-calling—and in my opinion, in vastly oversimplifying. It is easier to assert that the only reason someone might oppose Barak Obama as president is racism than it is to acknowledge that it might have something to do with a philosophical disagreement with the ideology of the libral progressive movement Barak Obama embodies. It’s also easier to assert that the only reasons a person might object to “gay marriage” are hate and religiously-based bigotry than it is to recognize that this is a very complex issue with roots not only in religion but in constitutional government and sociological concerns which could maybe be better addressed in a different manner. 

For me, this is a complex issue. Marriage is a complex issue itself, particularly as regards separation of church and state. In most cultures thoughout most of history, church and state have been merged to a very large extent, either with religion in the ascendant dictating governmental policy, or with civil authority dominant, and stepping in to define acceptable religious observance and belief. Part of the grand experiment that is The United States of America is this idea that government should not be allowed to interfere with religious doctrine or practice, and that religion should not be able to dictate civil law. Nor should one religion be allowed to regulate the doctrine or practice of another religion.

But where in this does marriage fall? Marriage, as an institution, has been around for millenia. It has existed in different nations and cultures, within vastly differing religious communities, and under widely divergent forms of government. There have been some variations from culture to culture regarding things like the age at which a person becomes eligible to enter into a marriage, the process by which the marriage is arranged and solemnized, the level of permanence expected of the union, and the number of marital unions a person may participate in simultaneously, or sequentially. In all cultures that I am aware of, marriage has conceptually and in practice been between members of the opposite sex.

Nevertheless, we don’t live in a broad, theoretical historical milieu, we live in a very specific time, and a very specific culture. In modern U.S. culture there is a movement to expand the definition of marriage to include committed same-sex unions. In modern U.S. culture, both designated religious authorities and designated civil authorities can perform marriages. And now the question arises—if church and state are separate, yet marriages can be solemnized by either one, or both, then who gets to decide what the definition of marriage is, and whether that definition should be altered? (more…)