Certified and Certifiable

First off, I would like it known to those of you who read this that I have just watched the Super Bowl episode of This is Us, so there is a good chance that I will reference this show. But I promise not spoil the show, other than of course to say that at the end he reveals himself to not only be the father of Luke Skywalker, but he is also Keyzer Soze.

Jack Pearson: First ballot Hall of Fame Dad

 Certified: verb

1. officially recognize (someone or something) as possessing certain qualifications or meeting certain standards.

Certifiable: adjective

1. officially recognized as needing treatment for a mental disorder.

It's a fine line folks. Somedays it just feels like they go together, like peas and carrots, Lennon and McCartney, Peanut Butter and Jelly, Frosty's and fries, and of course "rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong." (that was a Grease reference for the uninitiated or to anyone who apparently didn’t have VH1 between 1995 and the year 2000) We are officially certified. When children are up for adoption our names are officially in the pot to be chosen. We have met all the requirements that the State of Texas has put upon us. We even have a nice little certificate that we can frame and hang on our wall. We are also officially certifiable because we are crazy, and like most crazy people, there is nothing you can say or do to convince us that we aren't doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing. Luckily, this form of crazy doesn't involve a life living in a Montana cabin and mailing suspicious packages. It just involves changing our lives and the lives of a child, possibly 2, and turning that child into something they had no idea they would become: a Massey. I didn't choose to be a Massey, like greatness, it was thrust upon me. Well, greatness and the inability to reach the top shelf, but I did get a lovely singing voice out of it, so we'll call that a push. And our adoption children will have it thrust upon them as well and we are going to give them all that we have and all that we didn't realize we had held up in some sort of internal storage shed of energy, enthusiasm, care, compassion, determination, discipline, structure, insert other life skills here, and most of all, love. That's why we got into this whole thing to begin with, and I think that's why most parents decide to have children in the first place. I'm sure I'm being naive, or just a romantic, but I'd like to think that my parents didn't decide have me because one day I would be old enough to drive stretches of long car trips, or so I would be an extra set of hands to clean the kitchen, or because one day they would in fact conquer the world of A Capella and they needed a tenor quick because Dad's voice was starting to bottom out on them. I think they decided to have me because they knew somewhere that they had something that was a part of them that wasn't being tapped into yet and they wanted to spend that on me. They simply had love. And I know that when I look over at my wife and we've both been crying for 45 straight minutes because of some family on TV that we don't actually know, a fictional family, is reliving the anniversary of a horrific trauma that we aren’t really crying because it’s sad. We are crying because even with all that sadness and trauma we are seeing our own lives in those characters, a family who adopted and who raised their children as best as they could, just like we are going to do.  We have no idea when or if a call will come, but we are hopeful and terrified, which, like the abovementioned pairings, go together quite well.

In addition to become certified we also got to have another respite experience, taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old for 2 nights, and I’m not going to lie, before we got them I was pretty sure that I was going to be the one who needed the diapers. I had no idea what to expect, I just assumed it was going to be like being bombed: you can go about your business, but it is going to explode at some point. And you know what, it didn’t. These kids were great. The little one was super sweet, he loved being held, he had a vocabulary of about 4-5 words, pointed at everything, was easy to make laugh, so it was pretty much like hanging out with my dad. The other child was 3 and she was really sweet but she was a philosophy major in the making because everything was “Why?” Most of the time when she asked why it was easy to answer, like “Why are you wearing glasses?” or “Why does he have a spoon and I have a fork?” I didn’t have an answer for her when asked “Why did Pete Carroll throw for it on 4^th down against the Patriots? Or “Why did Garth Brooks put out an album as Chris Gaines?”

Nobody has answers for those questions. Nobody.

We’ve been really spoiled with our respite care experience, which makes me think that fate just might have something up its sleeve for us, to which I say:

Kuzcooooooooooo!